How Long Does It Take You To Write A Hubpage Article: How Much Time Should You Spend Writing A Hubpage Article

Updated on June 21, 2013

Time Spent Wisely

When you first start out, you should be realistic.

When you first start writing, you need to be realistic about your goals. Are you writing for fun, like a hobby, or expression, like art, or are you writing to make money or even a combination of factors. Depending on your motives, you will want to dedicate different amounts of time and energy. Writing can be extremely rewarding, frustrating, challenging, gratifying and very time consuming.

If you're writing for fun, and just for fun, by all means, spend your free time however you would like. But if you're like most of us here, we have big dreams of making an impact, reaching an audience, and if financial success follows so be it. And then there are those of us who title stuff, and use all kinds of other tricks to try and make as much money as possible at the sacrifice of their enjoyment. Some of the articles I see people writing on Hubpages are clearly of no interest to the writer and are merely designed as a means to an end. To me, I consider that time wasted. Very few of us, are making their living writing hubpages exclusively. Me personally, I enjoy the process, expression and experience, as I believe most of you do. So if you're first starting out, make sure you understand truly what it is you are here for.

Topics

Topic Selection Is Important

When you're writing, topic selection is important. You want to write about things that interest you or you'll quickly find that writing about things you aren't interested in seems more like punishment than enjoyment.

Writing should enhance your life so if you find yourself only writing because ad words show a topic to be low competition with high click values, you have to consider how successful can you really be if you have no interest in the topic. For a while, mesothelioma was a high ranking topic....how many of you truly enjoy that topic. And yet page after page was written.

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Even More Important Is Time

Time is the most important factor to consider when writing. Time spent writing is time you can't get back. I have experienced it, as have thousands of other people on here, when you have spent considerable time on an article, only to find that no one reads it. How discourage is that? If it was a topic you were interested in, maybe not so bad, since you've probably learned something you can re-work into a future writing. But if it wasn't something you cared about, I empathize with you. That sucks.

You need to watch your time. So the question: how much time should you spend writing a hub? Assuming you're writing for a blend of reaching an audience and some monetary recognition, if even just a few bucks, you probably don't want to spend more than a few hours tops on an article. If you find yourself spending a day or more writing a single article, then consider that at $20 an hour for an 8 hour day, you're opportunity cost is approximately $160 that you could have made doing something else. Before you realize a dime from writing, you have to consider the time you spent writing when you weren't getting paid.

Factor in opportunity costs as well. Time spent writing means less time with friends or family, or time spent outdoors or shopping or whatever other things bring you joy. You need to carefully consider what you are giving up.

You Won't Know Until You Try

How much time should you spend on a Hub? At the end of the day, the best way to answer that question is by trial an error. All the advice and judgment above is only good in theory. You won't really know until you know.

If you've never generated content before, you need to overcome a learning curve on how the mechanics of it all works. Believe me, people spend tremendous amounts of time and energy trying to learn these things. The amount to learn is insurmountable and it's likely you could spend years and still be surprised by what you've learned.

So start by writing a few articles. Set up ad-sense, analytics and hubpages earning program. Use the information you gain from your first few hubs to make changes. Read other hubbers and check out their articles to see how your peers are writing. Look at the "hub of the day" since hubpages views that as a success.

Once you get some feedback, you have the information to start truly evaluating your efforts.

Rule of Thumb

A good rule of thumb for writing an article is to keep in mind your readers reading habits. Most people aren't searching for an article to spend 30 minutes to read what you wrote. People search the internet largely to be entertained and informed.

Aim for 1,000 words, include at least 3 different text boxs, photo's and link to other hubs. If you do those things, you will find your time is well spent and you're not spending more than a few hours at most.

Final bit of advice: after spending a nominal amount of time, eg, don't spin your wheels trying to make a killer article, let it sit for a while. See what type of traffic it drives. If it doesn't get any attention, it may be that your topic simply is not good. There's no point in wasting your time on something that reaches no one. On the flip side, you may find your article gets some decent traffic and has some broader appeal, in which case, you can go ahead and invest some more time to make it truly worthwhile.